Diversity versus Democracy
Joanna Williams reviews On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era by Russell Jacoby
In his latest book, Russell Jacoby critiques our obsession with diversity. He argues that when diversity is pitched against individuality, democracy suffers. Here, Joanna Williams welcomes Jacoby’s criticisms of diversity initiatives but finds him far too pessimistic about democracy.
Diversity is the buzzword of our age. It is everywhere: celebrated in corporate mission statements; taught in staff training days and to school and university students; on display in advertisements, art galleries and theatres; and promoted in books and articles. Indeed, as Russell Jacoby argues in his latest book, ‘In recent decades the cult of diversity has swept the land.’ ‘We are all diverse all the time,’ he claims, or at least, he continues, ‘this is the message we hear incessantly.’
More than merely our lived reality, diversity is rhetoric: a prayer to be intoned in the name of moral purity and protection. It is not hard to understand why. ‘Diversity spells decency and openness,’ Jacoby explains, while at the same time: ‘To criticize diversity is to invite ostracism; you might as well climb on a desk and yell, “I am a racist and a fanatic!”’ Kudos, then, to Jacoby. In On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era he challenges this secular orthodoxy.
A vacuous concept
Jacoby strikes his first blow by exposing the vacuousness at the heart of our diversity obsession. The more the word is bandied around, he points out, the less it actually means, until ‘everything and anything signifies diversity.’ The ubiquity of the word shows that, ‘Our understanding of diversity is shallow. Literally skin deep.’ His point is clear: the diversity hucksters see little beyond skin colour and, perhaps, gender. They ‘want diversity on the cheap’ which means that ‘diversity talk today is group talk.’
This brings us to Jacoby’s second blow: the ballooning of the rhetoric parallels a decline in real diversity. The monolithic focus on a tiny number of group characteristics comes at the expense of valuing other attributes that differentiate us. Why, he asks, do the diversity obsessives have so little interest in languages? Or, for that matter, wealth? Poverty is rarely deemed worthy of inclusion in checklists: it ‘does not spell diversity, but exclusion.’ The bottom line, Jacoby concludes, is that, ‘a world of people who are different from us looks a lot more appealing than a world of people who are poorer than us.’ The diversity game really is that shallow.
As Jacoby notes, before diversity there was class and the working class, ‘represented not inequality or poverty, but a different political system.’ ‘I do not raise this in the name of lost causes,’ he points out, ‘but simply to get a sense of the narrow political diversity of the world we now live in.’ Indeed, as Jacoby’s title suggests, his focus is not the fate of the working class at all, but the fate of the individual. His concern is that the more diversity has come to be understood as group representation, the less we celebrate – or even have – difference between individuals. Groups and diversity are now conflated, Jacoby explains, ‘it is assumed that if you have the first, you have the second.’ Worse, it is assumed that once you ‘tabulate the group and the frame’, you ‘know everything worth knowing about a person’. Taxonomy is reborn as intersectionality.